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MillimeterMemory Trip
May 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
CBS' Dick Van Dyke Revisited catches up with TV's Petrie family in 2004 (bottom). It features Ray Romano introducing the show in color over the original set, and CG done by Van Dyke himself.
Larry Mazzeo felt both déjà vu and a great sense of responsibility when he stepped onto the set for the Dick Van Dyke Revisited special, scheduled to air on CBS this month.
Mazzeo, vice president of sales at Matchframe Video, Burbank, participated as both an actor and executive on the March shoot, which took place at the CBS Radford Studios, Studio City. The set was built to exactly replicate the familiar Petrie living room from the original Dick Van Dyke Show. Mazzeo helped supervise Matchframe's finishing post work on the TV movie, while at the same time reprising his original role (under the name Larry Mathews) of Ritchie, the son of Rob (Van Dyke) and Laura Petrie (Mary Tyler Moore).
“It was overwhelming, standing again in the Petrie living room with all those people,” says Mazzeo. “But in addition to the thrill of acting on this project, and working for (show creator) Carl Reiner again in a new, original episode, everyone was great about consulting me and my colleagues from Matchframe about shots they were getting for the effects we had to create in post.”
Matchframe created several effects to bridge the gap between the 1960s and 2004, in which the new episode takes place. (The show also features vintage clips from the original series meant to pay tribute to deceased actors on the program, including Morey Amsterdam, Richard Deacon, and Jerry Paris.) Among the most complicated of those effects was the opening sequence of the show, in which actor Ray Romano introduces the program by walking onto the original, black-and-white Petrie living room set. Romano — himself in color — walks the length of the black-and-white set, which created a host of issues for Matchframe.
“Carl Reiner wanted the living room to be just as it was in the original show, and we couldn't place Ray into clips of the old show's set because we didn't have access to the original, 4:3 film clips — only DigiBeta was available,” explains Jon Van Wye, Matchframe's Smoke compositor on the job. “We batted around other ideas — having Ray on greenscreen and so forth. But then, having him walk through the door and interact with the room would require frame-by-frame roto-scoping which, in my opinion, always looks like rotoscoping. Instead, I suggested that we lock the cameras down for two shots — one of the living room set, and a second showing Ray's entrance. I was then able to composite over the black-and-white shot of the set by creating a difference matte in Smoke, calculating the differences between each frame of the two shots, and automatically cutting a matte that eliminates those differences. Our Mac artist, Jennifer Ngou, used Commotion (4.1) in our Macintosh HD suite to then make minor changes before I did a final composite in Smoke.”
In another effect, Van Dyke dances with an animated version of himself over background shots of the Taj Mahal and the Washington Monument. Mazzeo proudly points out that the CG version of Van Dyke was created by Van Dyke himself at home, using LightWave. Matchframe then composited the animation and the live action together in an Avid DS HD suite.
“Dick has become a talented animator in his own right, and works constantly in computer animation at home,” says Mazzeo of his longtime friend. “He gave us the sequence as sequential Targa image files, and we took those files, laid them off to tape, upconverted the whole thing, and then did the compositing work.”
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
